Guidelines for Effective Organizing Systems
What is an ‘organizing system’?
Basically it is any strategy, method and means that you use to get organized and stay organized. An organizing system could be created with several steps, or a few. It could be simple, or complex.
For instance, a system could be the method you use to sort your mail and ensure you pay your bills on time.
As you create a workable system, keep these questions in mind:
- What are my goals for a good system? What results would I like?
- What is my current system for doing things? What results do I get?
- What steps might I try to get the results that I want?
When you create your systems to keep you organized, keep the following guidelines in mind:
- Your system ought to make sense to you and work well for you. It doesn’t have to make sense to the rest of the world! Because we are all unique, what works for one person just may not work for another person.
- Your system ought to get you the results you want.
- Systems ought to be as simple as possible. Don’t create an overly complicated system when a simple one will do the job.
- Systems ought to be easy to use. Always choose functional, effective and efficient over ‘pretty’. A beautiful system that you won’t use or that is too time-consuming to keep up is not going to get you where you want to go in your life.
- Systems ought to be as low-maintenance as possible. Be realistic about how much time and energy you are willing and able to devote to maintaining your organizing systems.
- Systems ought to build on your strengths and preferences. You need to like your system. So, if you do best with visual cues and love colors, use colorful systems.
- For every system that you create, consider how you will manage the increase and the decrease in the amounts of items. Consider keeping what is ‘coming in’ to a minimum and removing, discarding, or deleting items as quickly as possible.
If you follow these guidelines you are well on the way to creating a system that will work for you. Don’t be afraid to give yourself a trial period of time whereby you test out and experiment with your new system. Giving yourself this trial period allows you the opportunity to really determine if what you created is working for you and getting the results you identified are important to you.
Experimenting and ‘tweaking’ it ensures it will eventually suit your needs perfectly.
